Michael Robotham

Well, she was absolutely, I think, passionately in love with her own character, Ripley.

I think she found the world of her writing much more compelling than the real world.

And I think Ripley was the sort of culmination of that trance-like belonging she had to her inner world.

And I imagined that really how she would most want it to have left the world would be at the hands of her very beguiling, very charismatic and rather charming serial killer.

So that was where the play came from.

I mean it was in addition to a sort of fantasy about how she would have liked to have died, it was I suppose, you know, a kind of an imagining on my part of how every writer becomes completely intrigued by and loyal to the world of their own imagining.

And in fact, you know, it becomes more real to them.

And so the idea of her being visited by Ripley, albeit disguised as a young man from her New York publishing house, who over the course of the three days reveals himself to be Ripley, it felt to me not so surreal.

You know, it felt to me actually a fairly realistic scenario because as writers we are intrigued by and in love with our own characters.

Oh, well, it's the ultimate.

I mean, I don't think there'd be a writer alive that didn't wish that they'd had the idea for Strangers on a Train before Patricia Highsmith did because those ideas that really sing as any property, whether it's theatrical or cinematic or prose, are ones which are fundamentally symmetrical and simple and

There's something about the symmetry of the idea that is completely and utterly persuasive and exciting, I think.

It's a sexy idea.

And also that idea of corruption, I think, that there are two characters, one of whom is more corrupt than the other but whose moral culpability is infectious and

And the way in which Bruno drags Guy into the darker side of his psyche is also a completely mesmerising plot device, I think, as we see someone who we may identify with in the beginning as being like us, as kind of morally normal or conventional, but

gradually give way to their deeper impulses and I think Joan Schenker who wrote the brilliant biography of Highsmith said that the story attacks its readers right where they live and I think that's really true I think that it's that what she establishes there as a 29 year old writer

is that we can all identify with the protagonists who find that their own moral boundaries shaking and eventually disappearing to sort of unleash their darker, wilder, uninhibited, sadistic impulses.

Yes, I did, I did.

But, of course, once you're kind of embedded in your own work of imagination, you have to put aside all fact completely

So I trusted that I had inhabited her in a kind of believable and truthful way through all my reading and listening.